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Monday, September 27, 2010

El Questro!

Friday was the last day of term 3 here in Western Australia, yahhh, that means two weeks of school holidays stretched out in front of us! So we packed up the car and joined Mr and Mrs F once again on an adventure. We went to El Questro, again! At 421,000 square kilometres, - that’s five times the size of Tasmania, 1.7 times the size of the United Kingdom and 10 times the size of Switzerland (according to their website), I think we can safely assume that we will see something different this trip!

We camped this time, in our own tent, cooked our dinner and breakfast on our little gas burner. The kids thought it was fantastic! After we had set up camp on the Saturday, we drove out to Branco’s Lookout. Cracked open a bottle of champers and had some nibbles and toasted that we had survived term 3 of the school year!

The next day we were up early and day went to El Questro Gorge. Here is Daz and Mr F just checking out the depth of the first water crossing. Yep, looks good, lets go boys!

It was a shaded walk. Clear pools and ferns growing up one side, very pretty.

We set up the self timer on the camera and managed to get a shot in what they call the half way pool. The trail here stopped being a blue easy trail and went up to a hard red from this point. With the girls in tow we didn't go any further. To get around this rock you had to climb up the waterfall on the right or the rock on the left, bit tricky!

That afternoon we went on a boat cruise up Chamberlain Gorge. It has towering 300 metre escarpments and no crowds as you can only get to it by boat. On the drive down to the jetty though you do catch a glance of the posh Homestead accommodation.

We stayed at what is called the Station. They had created a little swimming pool in the Pentecost River which we all loved dipping in. Milly practiced her floating. Little fish would nibble your ankles though which for me took a bit to get used to.

There were donkeys and some horses near the camp ground. They woke us every morning with their loud eorrrrr! One morning while I was trying to drink my coffee in peace I sent the girls up with the camera to take some shots and Grace came back with this one of Milly. I don't know who was more impressed with themselves, Milly for touching the donkey or Grace for taking a great photo.

Then as we left this morning,we turned the corner to find these brogla's calmly drinking in the river. Thanks for another great time El Questro, see you soon!

8 comments:

This looks so cool! My DH and I would really like to visit Australia someday and see places like this--especially after seeing your pics and watching "McLeod's Daughters" on netflix. Thanks for sharing!

I LOVE your pictures and they make me long for visiting your lovely country again. We used to live in Sydney for 3 years, and have been planning our return every since we left Down Under in 1996, but something always come up (like having 3 kids :-) ) to make us postpone the visit. But we'll return! :-)

Love your quilting too! I started quilting while living in Sydney, so your blog includes everything important for me :-)

This brings back some memories. For our honeymoon, we drove from Kunnanurra to Broome via the Gibb River Road. And we stayed at el Questro for a few days. just loved it. I hope you spent some time hanging back at Zibbeedee (sp?) springs. We hope to get back there some day, it was just brilliant and one of the best holidays we've ever had. :)